Chronicles of Terror: Silent Screams

by Steve Haberman

By the end of the 1920s, sound in films was firmly established as a commercial necessity. With the death of Lon Chaney in 1930, America’s foremost apostle of the weird and morbid in cinema was gone. In Germany, financial collapse and frightening political upheavals drove filmmakers to abandon the supernatural for the grim realities of modern life. But the silent era had introduced most of the major themes of the horror film that would be revisited and explored for the remainder of the century. Manmade monsters, vampires, soulless robots, Satanists, witches, sex killers, deformed maniacs, mad scientists, giant dinosaurs, ghosts and the Devil himself had all been subjects in the medium’s first two decades. The genre had even produced enduring masterpieces such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Golem, Barrymore’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Haxan, Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera, Metropolis, Galeen’s remake of The Student of Prague, The Unknown and West of Zanzibar. Steve Haberman, with Silent Screams, the first book in his horror tome Chronicles of Terror, offers a loving tribute to silent horror films, works which would form a strong foundation for the filmic terrors yet to come.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Steve earned a B. A. Degree from the University of Texas in Austin, majoring in political science and minoring in history. Afterwards he passed his stock broker's exam and worked for a time at a brokerage house before returning to school. Upon getting his legal assistant certification from UCLA, he worked at a law firm in Los Angeles. Successful stock market investments allowed him to retire early and to pursue two dreams: write and travel. He now divides his time between San Diego and European cities where he researches his stories. He speaks some French and Italian, four words in German, and hopes to expand his fluency in all three in his continuing trips abroad.

He enjoys the cosmopolitan bustle, sidewalk cafes, the museums of Berlin, Rome, Vienna, London, Budapest, and Paris. Many of these capitals and other cities find their way into his stories of intrigue..."Murder Without Pity" (Paris), "The Killing Ploy" (London, Berlin, Paris, and Lugano), "Darkness and Blood" (London and Paris), "Winston Churchill's Renegade Spy" (London and Zurich), “Where the Bones Lie" (Berlin), and his latest, "The Spy from Palestine" (Israel). This last thriller won the 2024 Literary Titan Silver Book Award.

Reviews

[Whitney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought it was an interesting read and learned a few things about the silent movie era. The only problem I had was with how the text format was set up. It was a bit hard to read.

[Sean O'Hara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview of horror movies through the silent era. Unsurprisingly, America gets most of the attention, though Haberman devotes two chapters to European cinema -- one (the longest in the book) to German film, and one to the rest of Europe, though really he only mentions three films (Haxan, The Lodger, and a mediocre French production of The Fall of the House of Usher). When Haberman turns to the United States, he gives a quick overview of the genre up to 1920, which pretty much consists of adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde, and then a rough summary of American horror in the 1920s. After this, the book focuses on Lon Chaney's career, devoting two chapters to his horror films, with the second focusing on his collaborations with Tod Browning. There follows an entire chapter on Willis O'Brien and the development of stop-motion animation for The Lost World. The book concludes with a discussion of the Old Dark House genre of horror comedies (The Bat, The Cat and the Canary, etc.), most of which were made by the European directors discussed in the early chapters.

This is an extremely dense book, with every paragraph of its short 250 pages packed with information, but Haberman keeps it readable for the most part -- some of his summaries of the films he's discussing, though absolutely necessary when dealing with the more obscure films (and let's face it, for most people, any silent film is obscure), can be a bit hard to follow, particularly the high melodramas where the stories are nothing but contrivance layered upon contrivance. My one complaint is the way in which Haberman passes judgement on Browning's London After Dark, a film that's been lost for decades. Although what's known of the plot sounds absurdly convoluted, and Browning did a talkie remake (Mark of the Vampire, with Bela Lugosi) that's highly mediocre, it's unfair to criticize the original sight-unseen.

The book is subtitled "Chronicles of Terror Volume 1," and Haberman's afterword ends with a perfect segue into the Universal horror films of the 1930s, however this volume was published in 2003 and there's no sign on the 'net of a followup, which I find highly disappointing (though, given that I'm the first person to even rate the book on Goodreads should't be surprising).

[Leonora · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good historical overview of silent horror movies though I felt it spent a bit too much time on Metropolis. Although Metropolis is great and highly influential I think it's a stretch to call it a horror movie even if it is a genre film. The Passion of Joan of Arc has much more in common with horror movies than Metropolis.